1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to portable power equipment and in particular to a piece of power equipment that will create mulch from soft biodegradable products such as paper.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The field of light duty portable power equipment contains a wide variety of tools, most are special purpose as oppose to general purpose tools. The vast majority of ripping, grinding, and tearing tools are in the general area of forestry and brush working tools. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,069,101 issued Dec. 18, 1962 to Wexell and U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,834 issued Aug. 22, 1989 to Lanham both show wood chippers. Lanham improves the process by making the chips thinner then other wood and brush chippers. In general, wood chippers operate with a heavy fly wheel containing several cutting edges on the face and operate at high speed using momentum of the wheel as part of the cutting force. Since the product chipped is hard, this works effectively. If this style machine was used on a soft product the machine would soon jam and the flywheel would be brought to an abrupt stop.
A general purpose machine is seen in U.S. Pat. No. 3,241,173 issued Mar. 22, 1966 to Finn. The Finn machine consists of a gasoline powered blower which converts into a vacuum fan and a system for blowing mulch. These machines are often seen behind landscaper's trucks and are distinguished from the instant invention in that they simply blow hay and straw mulch on freshly seeded areas. This machine does not create mulch, the mulch comes in bails that are opened by an operator who feeds mulch into a hopper. A type of chipper/shredder is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,199,653 issued Apr. 6, 1993 to Durrant et al. The patent concerns the discharge assembly without details to the chipper however, the appearance of the side inlet chute implies that it is of the heavy fly wheel type and could not handle soft material products.
A different aspect of grinding, ripping and tearing is seen in the garbage grinder feeder disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,963,229 issued Dec. 6, 1960 to Rhodes. The patent discloses three point or star shaped spiders for breaking, crushing and grinding the waste product in order that it will flow from the hopper into the main grinder. The device is powered by electric motors but fails to show the structure of the instant invention.